OPERA America draws on resources and expertise from within and beyond the opera field to advance a mutually beneficial agenda that serves and strengthens the field through programs in the following categories:

Creation: Artistic services that help artists and companies increase the creativity and excellence of opera productions, especially North American works;

Presentation: Opera company services that address the specific needs of staff, trustees and volunteers;

Enjoyment: Education, audience development and community services that increase all forms of opera appreciation.

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In response to the pressing need for appropriate space in New York by members who suffered from the lack of good audition and work facilities in the city, OPERA America created the National Opera Center. The Opera Center serves many functions that support the artistic and economic vitality of the field by providing its constituents with a range and level of services never before possible.

OPERA America serves the entire opera field through research, publications and services. We work daily to facilitate the creation, performance and enjoyment of opera throughout North America. Much of what we do is made possible through generous contributions from opera lovers like you.

Kurt Julian Weill (March 2, 1900 – April 3, 1950) was a German-Jewish composer, growing up in a religious household. He began piano lessons at 12 and immediately began experimenting with his own compositions. His early success came with his non-stage works though he gravitated toward vocal music and musical theatre. He fled Nazi Germany in 1933, denounced for his socialist views despite being a popular composer. Traveling to Paris, London, and the US he eventually became a United States citizen in 1943. His ideals of writing music that served a socially useful purpose followed him in his travels and he wrote Down in the Valley and other songs in support of the American war effort. Weill died of a heart attack in New York City. His music is still popular sixty years after his death.

The opera is set in the 1930s, in front of a tenement on the Lower East Side of New York City. The neighborhood is populated by many different nationalities: an ebullient Italian, a fat, comfortable Hausfrau, a thick-headed Swedish couple, a left-wing Russian Jew, and hardened Americans who despise the foreigners. Of the opera, Weill wrote, "Street Scene is about life in a street of New York. We see, in the beginning, the women who live in the house, sitting on the steps, complaining about the heat, talking to the janitor who comes up from the cellar singing his blues song, gossiping about Mrs. Maurrant's love life, and making fun of young Buchanan whose wife is having a baby. Then we hear Mrs. Maurrant's aria expressing her troubled mind and her secret desires; the song of the young girls coming home from the graduation exercises; Sam Kaplan's song of adolescent melancholy; then Rose Maurrant's scene with her 'boss,' Mr. Easter, who is trying to lure her into a different sort of life; Rose's decision to live her own kind of life; and the scene of young love between Rose and Sam, dreaming of lilac bushes and happiness. The second act opens with the morning music, the awakening of the house and the 'Children's Game,' and goes on to Mrs. Maurrant's touching song to her little son, a passionate duet of the two lovers, Sam and Rose, who have decided to take life in their own hands, and the horror-stricken death scene of Mrs. Maurrant. In the last scene we see two nursemaids trying to sing the babies to sleep, while at the same time gossiping about their parents; Rose meeting, for the last time, her father who has killed his wife and is being taken away by the police, and finally, Rose saying goodbye to the one she loves.

The New Yorker, Andrew Porter, 11-13-78; The New York Times, Bernard Holland, 9-7-90; The New York Times, Allan Kozinn, 9-9-90; The New Yorker, Andrew Porter, 10-27-79; The New York Times, John Rockwell, 11-12-78; The New York Times, John S. Wilson, 1-10-82; The New York Times, Joseph Horowitz, 10-26-79.

Comments:

Weill received the first Tony Award for Best Original Score, and Ballard received the 1947 Tony Award for Best Costume Design.

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